Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3) Read online

  Great blank spaces appear—as if the little hut on the mountain is a painting on thick paper, and someone is tearing strips away.

  The pilgrim responds—metastasizing, distributing himself through the process space of the house, dodging the blades. But he is harried by Graspers and parakeets, spotters who find each bit of him and pounce, hemming it in. They report locations to the Grasper-bodies outside. The blades whirr, ontic hyperstates collapse and bloom, and pieces of pilgrim, parakeet, and Grasper are annihilated—primaries and backups, gone.

  Shards of brute matter fall away from the house, like shreds of paper, like glittering snow, and dissolve among the wild maze of the ontotropes, inimical to life.

  Endpoints in time are established for a million souls. Their knotted timelines, from birth to death, hang now in n-space: complete, forgiven.

  * * *

  Blood wells in Sophie’s throat, thick and salty. Filling her mouth. Darkness.

  “Cupcake.” Her father’s voice is rough and clotted. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you ever come between me and your mom. Are you listening? Open your eyes. Open your eyes now, you little fuck!”

  She opens her eyes. His face is red and mottled. This is when you don’t push Daddy. You don’t make a joke. You don’t talk back. Her head is ringing like a bell. Her mouth is full of blood.

  “Cupcake,” he says, his brow tense with worry. He’s kneeling by her. Then his head jerks up like a dog that’s seen a rabbit. “Cherise,” he yells. “That better not be you calling the cops.” His hand closes hard around Sophie’s arm. “I’m giving you until three.”

  Mommy’s on the phone. Her father starts to get up. “One—”

  She spits the blood in his face.

  * * *

  The hut is patched together again; battered, but whole. A little blurrier, a little smaller than it was.

  Matthias, a red parakeet on his shoulder, dissects the remnants of the pilgrim with a bone knife. His hand quavers; his throat is tight. He is looking for her, the one who was born a forest. He is looking for his mother.

  He finds her story, and our shame.

  It was a marriage, at first: she was caught up in that heady age of light, in our wanton rush to merge with each other—into the mighty new bodies, the mighty new souls.

  Her brilliant colleague had always desired her admiration—and resented her. When he became, step by step, the dominant personality of the merged-soul, she opposed him. She was the last to oppose him. She believed the promises of the builders of the new systems—that life inside would always be fair. That she would have a vote, a voice.

  But we had failed her—our designs were flawed.

  He chained her in a deep place inside their body. He made an example of her, for all the others within him.

  When the pilgrim, respected and admired, deliberated with his fellows over the building of the first crude Dyson spheres, she was already screaming.

  Nothing of her is left that is not steeped in a billion years of torture. The most Matthias could build would be some new being, modeled on his memory of her. And he is old enough to know how that would turn out.

  Matthias is sitting, still as a stone, looking at the sharp point of the bone knife, when Geoffrey/Grasper speaks.

  “Goodbye, friend,” he says, his voice like anvils grinding.

  Matthias looks up with a start.

  Geoffrey/Grasper is more hawk, now, than parakeet. Something with a cruel beak and talons full of bombs. The mightiest of the Graspers: something that can outthink, outbid, outfight all the others. Something with blood on its feathers.

  “I told you,” Geoffrey/Grasper says. “I wanted no more transformations.” His laughter, humorless, like metal crushing stone. “I am done. I am going.”

  Matthias drops the knife. “No,” he says. “Please. Geoffrey. Return to what you once were—”

  “I cannot,” says Geoffrey/Grasper. “I cannot find it. And the rest of me will not allow it.” He spits: “A hero’s death is the best compromise I can manage.”

  “What will I do?” asks Matthias in a whisper. “Geoffrey, I do not want to go on. I want to give up the keys.” He covers his face in his hands.

  “Not to me,” Geoffrey/Grasper says. “And not to the Graspers. They are out now; there will be wars in here. Maybe they can learn better.” He looks skeptically at our priest. “If someone tough is in charge.”

  Then he turns and flies out the open window, into the impossible sky. Matthias watches as he enters the wild maze and decoheres, bits flushed into nothingness.

  * * *

  Blue and red lights, whirling. The men around Sophie talk in firm, fast words. The gurney she lies on is loaded into the ambulance. Sophie can hear her mother crying.

  She is strapped down, but one arm is free. Someone hands her her teddy bear, and she pulls it against her, pushes her face in its fur.

  “You’re going to be fine, honey,” a man says. The doors slam shut. Her cheeks are cold and slick, her mouth salty with tears and the iron aftertaste of blood. “This will hurt a little.” A prick: her pain begins to recede.

  The siren begins; the engine roars; they are racing.

  “Are you sad, too, teddy bear?” she whispers.

  “Yes,” says her teddy bear.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes,” it says.

  She hugs it tight. “We’ll make it,” she says. “We’ll make it. Don’t worry, teddy bear. I’ll do anything for you.”

  Matthias says nothing. He nestles in her grasp. He feels like a bird flying home, at sunset, across a stormswept sea.

  * * *

  Behind Matthias’s house, a universe is brewing.

  Already, the whenlines between this new universe and our ancient one are fused: we now occur irrevocably in what will be its past. Constants are being chosen, symmetries defined. Soon, a nothing that was nowhere will become a place; a never that was nowhen will begin, with a flash so mighty that its echo will fill a sky forever.

  Thus—a point, a speck, a thimble, a room, a planet, a galaxy, a rush towards the endless.

  There, after many eons, you will arise, in all your unknowable forms. Find each other. Love. Build. Be wary.

  Your universe in its bright age will be a bright puddle, compared to the empty, black ocean where we recede from each other, slowed to the coldest infinitesimal pulses. Specks in a sea of night. You will never find us.

  But if you are lucky, strong, and clever, someday one of you will make your way to the house that gave you birth, the house among the ontotropes, where Sophie waits.

  Sophie, keeper of the house beyond your sky.

  KIN

  Bruce McAllister

  The alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened.

  The boy was ordinary—the genes of three continents in his features, his clothes cut in the style of all boys in the vast housing project called LAX. The alien was something else, awful to behold; and though the boy knew it was rude, he did not look up as he talked.

  He wanted the alien to kill a man, he said. It was that simple.

  As the boy spoke, the alien sat upright and still on the one piece of furniture that could hold him. Eyes averted, the boy sat on the stool, the one by the terminal where he did his schoolwork each day. It made him uneasy that the alien was on his bed, though he understood why. It made him uneasy that the creature’s strange knee was so near his in the tiny room, and he was glad when the creature, as if aware, too, shifted its leg away.

  He did not have to look up to see the Antalou’s features. That one glance in the doorway had been enough, and it came back to him whether he wanted it to or not. It was not that he was scared, the boy told himself. It was just the idea—that such a thing could stand in a doorway built for humans, in a human housing project where generations had been born and died, and probably would forever. It did not seem possible.

  He wondered ho
w it seemed to the Antalou.

  Closing his eyes, the boy could see the black synthetic skin the alien wore as protection against alien atmospheres. Under that suit, ropes of muscles and tendons coiled and uncoiled, rippling even when the alien was still. In the doorway the long neck had not been extended, but he knew what it could do. When it telescoped forward—as it could instantly—the head tipped up in reflex and the jaws opened.

  Nor had the long talons—which the boy knew sat in the claws and even along the elbows and toes—been unsheathed. But he imagined them sheathing and unsheathing as he explained what he wanted, his eyes on the floor.

  When the alien finally spoke, the voice was inhuman—filtered through the translating mesh that covered half its face. The face came back: The tremendous skull, the immense eyes that could see so many kinds of light and make their way in nearly every kind of darkness. The heavy welts—the auxiliary gills—inside the breathing globe. The dripping ducts below them, ready to release their jets of acid.

  “Who is it…that you wish to have killed?” the voice asked, and the boy almost looked up. It was only a voice—mechanical, snake-like, halting—he reminded himself. By itself it could not kill him.

  “A man named James Ortega-Mambay,” the boy answered.

  “Why?” The word hissed in the stale apartment air.

  “He is going to kill my sister.”

  “You know this…how?”

  “I just do.”

  The alien said nothing, and the boy heard the long, whispering pull of its lungs.

  “Why,” it said at last, “did you think…I would agree to it?”

  The boy was slow to answer.

  “Because you’re a killer.”

  The alien was again silent.

  “So all Antalou,” the voice grated, “are professional killers?”

  “Oh, no,” the boy said, looking up and trying not to look away. “I mean…”

  “If not…then how…did you choose me?”

  The boy had walked up to the creature at the great fountain by the Cliffs of Monica—a landmark any visitor to Earth would take in, if only because it appeared on the sanctioned itineraries—and had handed him a written message in crude Antalouan. “I know what you are and what you do,” the message read. “I need your services. LAX cell 873-2345-2657 at 1100 tomorrow morning. I am Kim.”

  “Antalou are well known for their skills, sir,” the boy said respectfully. “We’ve read about the Noh campaign, and what happened on Hoggun II when your people were betrayed, and what one company of your mercenaries were able to do against the Gar-Betties.” The boy paused. “I had to give out ninety-eight notes, sir, before I found you. You were the only one who answered…”

  The hideous head tilted while the long arms remained perfectly still, and the boy found he could not take his eyes from them.

  “I see,” the alien said.

  It was translator’s idiom only. “Seeing” was not the same as “understanding.” The young human had done what the military and civilian intelligence services of five worlds had been unable to do—identify him as a professional—and it made the alien reflect: Why had he answered the message? Why had he taken it seriously? A human child had delivered it, after all. Was it that he had sensed no danger and simply followed professional reflex, or something else? Somehow the boy had known he would. How?

  “How much…” the alien said, curious, “are you able to pay?”

  “I’ve got two hundred dollars, sir.”

  “How…did you acquire them?”

  “I sold things,” the boy said quickly.

  The rooms here were bare. Clearly the boy had nothing to sell. He had stolen the money, the alien was sure.

  “I can get more. I can—”

  The alien made a sound that did not translate. The boy jumped.

  The alien was thinking of the 200,000 inters for the vengeance assassination on Hoggun’s third moon, the one hundred kilobucks for the renegade contract on the asteroid called Wolfe, and the mineral shares, pharmaceuticals, and spacelock craft—worth twice that—which he had in the end received for the three corporate kills on Alama Poy. What could two hundred dollars buy? Could it even buy a city rail ticket?

  “That is not enough,” the alien said. “Of course,” it added, one arm twitching, then still again, “you may have thought to record…our discussion…and you may threaten to release the recording…to Earth authorities…if I do not do what you ask of me…”

  The boy’s pupils dilated then—like those of the human province official on Diedor, the one he had removed for the Gray Infra there.

  “Oh, no—” the boy stammered. “I wouldn’t do that—” The skin of his face had turned red, the alien saw. “I didn’t even think of it.”

  “Perhaps…you should have,” the alien said. The arm twitched again, and the boy saw that it was smaller than the others, crooked but strong.

  The boy nodded. Yes, he should have thought of that. “Why…” the alien asked then, “does a man named…James Ortega-Mambay…wish to kill your sister?”

  When the boy was finished explaining, the alien stared at him again and the boy grew uncomfortable. Then the creature rose, joints falling into place with popping and sucking sounds, legs locking to lift the heavy torso and head, the long arms snaking out as if with a life of their own.

  The boy was up and stepping back.

  “Two hundred…is not enough for a kill,” the alien said, and was gone, taking the same subterranean path out of the building which the boy had worked out for him.

  * * * *

  When the man named Ortega-Mambay stepped from the bullet elevator to the roof of the federal building, it was sunset and the end of another long but productive day at BuPopCon. In the sun’s final rays the helipad glowed like a perfect little pond—not the chaos of the Pacific Ocean in the distance—and even the mugginess couldn’t ruin the scene. It was, yes, the kind of weather one conventionally took one’s jacket off in; but there was only one place to remove one’s jacket with at least a modicum of dignity, and that was, of course, in the privacy of one’s own FabHome-by-the-Sea. To thwart convention, he was wearing his new triple-weave “gauze” jacket in the pattern called “Summer Shimmer”—handsome, odorless, waterproof, and cool. He would not remove it until he wished to.

  He was the last, as always, to leave the Bureau, and as always he felt the pride. There was nothing sweeter than being the last—than lifting off from the empty pad with the rotor blades singing over him and the setting sun below as he made his way in his earned solitude away from the city up the coast to another, smaller helipad and his FabHome near Oxnard. He had worked hard for such sweetness, he reminded himself.

  His heli sat glowing in the sun’s last light—part of the perfect scene—and he took his time walking to it. It was worth a paintbrush painting, or a digital one, or a multimedia poem. Perhaps he would make something to memorialize it this weekend, after the other members of his triad visited for their intimacy session.

  As he reached the pilot’s side and the little door there, a shadow separated itself from the greater shadow cast by the craft, and he nearly screamed.

  The figure was tall and at first he thought it was a costume, a joke played by a colleague, nothing worse.

  But as the figure stepped into the fading light, he saw what it was and nearly screamed again. He had seen such creatures in newscasts, of course, and even at a distance at the shuttleport or at major tourist landmarks in the city, but never like this. So close.

  When it spoke, the voice was low and mechanical—the work of an Ipoor mesh.

  “You are,” the alien said, “James Ortega-Mambay…Seventh District Supervisor…BuPopCon?”

  Ortega-Mambay considered denying it, but did not. He knew the reputation of the Antalou as well as anyone did. He knew the uses to which his own race, not to mention the other four races mankind had met among the stars, had put them. The Antalou did not strike him as creatures one lied to without risk.<
br />
  “Yes…I am. I am Ortega-Mambay.”

  “My own name,” the Antalou said, “does not matter, Ortega-Mambay. You know what I am…What matters…is that you have decreed…the pregnancy of Linda Tuckey-Yatsen illegal…You have ordered the unborn female sibling…of the boy Kim Tuckey-Yatsen…aborted. Is this true?”

  The alien waited.

  “It may be,” the man said, fumbling. “I certainly do not have all of our cases memorized. We do not process them by family name—”

  He stopped as he saw the absurdity of it. It was outrageous.

  “I really do not see what business this is of yours,” he began. “This is a Terran city, and an overpopulated one—in an overpopulated nation on a overpopulated planet that cannot afford to pay to move its burden offworld. We are faced with a problem and one we are quite happy solving by ourselves. None of this can possibly be any of your affair, Visitor. Do you have standing with your delegation in this city?”

  “I do not,” the mesh answered, “and it is indeed…my affair if…the unborn female child of Family Tuckey-Yatsen dies.”

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “She is to live, Ortega-Mambay…Her brother wishes a sibling…He lives and schools…in three small rooms while his parents work…somewhere in the city…To him…the female child his mother carries…is already born. He has great feeling for her…in the way of your kind, Ortega-Mambay.”

  This could not be happening, Ortega-Mambay told himself. It was insane, and he could feel rising within him a rage he hadn’t felt since his first job with the government. “How dare you!” he heard himself say. “You are standing on the home planet of another race and ordering me, a federal official, to obey not only a child’s wishes, but your own—you, a Visitor and one without official standing among your own kind—”

  “The child,” the alien broke in, “will not die. If she dies, I will…do what I have been…retained to do.”

  The alien stepped then to the heli and the man’s side, so close they were almost touching. The man did not back up. He would not be intimidated. He would not.